WHATS NEW IN 1.9.18 - January 7th 1998. ======================================= This is the latest stable release of Samba. This is the version that all production Samba servers should be running for all current bug-fixes. This release contains several major changes and much re-written code. The main changes are : 1). Oplock support now operational. ----------------------------------- Samba now supports 'exclusive' and 'batch' oplocks. These are an advanced networked file system feature that allows clients to obtain a exclusive use of a file. This allows a client to cache any changes it makes locally, and greatly improves performance. Windows NT has this feature and prior to this release this was one of the reasons Windows NT could be faster in some situations. Samba has now been benchmarked as out performing Windows NT on equivalently priced hardware. The oplock code in Samba has been extensively tested and is believed to be completely stable. Please report any problems to the samba-bugs alias. 2). NetBIOS name daemon re-written. ----------------------------------- The old nmbd that has caused some users problems has now been completely re-written and now is much easier to maintain and add changes to. Changes include support for multi-homed hosts in the same way as an NT Server with multiple IP interfaces behaves (registers with the WINS server as a multi-homed name type), and also support for multi-homed name registration in the Samba WINS server. Another added feature is robustness in the face of WINS server failure, nmbd will now keep trying to contact the WINS server until it is successful, in the same way as an NT Server. Also in this release is an implementation of the Lanman announce protocol used by OS/2 clients. Thanks to Jacco de Leeuw for this code. 3). New Internationalization support. ------------------------------------- With this release Samba no longer needs to be separately compiled for Japanese (Kanji) support, the same binary will serve both Kanji and non-Kanji clients. A new method of dynamically loading client code pages has been added to allow the case insensitivity to be done dependent on the code page of the client. Note that Samba still will only handle one client code page at a time. This will be fixed when Samba is fully UNICODE enabled. Please see the new man page for make_smbcodepage for details on adding additional client code page support. 4). New Printing support. ------------------------- An implementation of the Windows 95 automatic printer driver installation has been added to smbd. To use this new feature please read the document: docs/PRINTER_DRIVER.txt Thanks to Jean-Francois Micouleau, and also Herb Lewis of Silicon Graphics for this new code. Printer support on System V systems (notably Solaris) has been improved with the addition of code generously donated by Norm Jacobs of Sun Microsystems. Sun have also made a Solaris SPARC workstation available to the Samba Team to aid in their porting efforts. Changed code. ------------- Samba no longer needs the libdes library to support encrypted passwords. Samba now contains a restricted version of DES that can only be used for authentication purposes (to comply with the USA export encryption regulations and to allow USA Mirror sites to carry Samba source code). The 'encrypt passwords' parameter may now be used without recompiling. Much of the internals of Samba has been re-structured to support the oplock and Domain controller changes. Samba now contains an implementation of share modes using System V shared memory as well as the mmap() based code. This was done to allow the 'FAST_SHARE_MODES' to be used on more systems (especially HPUX 9.x) that have System V shared memory, but not the mmap() call. The System V shared memory code is used by default on many systems as it has benchmarked as faster on many systems. The Automount code has been slightly re-shuffled, such that the home directory (and profile location) can be specified by \\%N\homes and \\%N\homes\profiles respectively, which are the defaults for these values. If -DAUTOMOUNT is enabled, then %N is the server component of the user's NIS auto.home entry. Obviously, you will need to be running Samba on the user's home server as well as the one they just logged in on. The RPC Domain code has been moved into a separate directory rpc_pipe/, and a LGPL License issued specifically for code in this directory. This is so that people can use this code in other projects. Missing feature. ---------------- One feature that we wanted to get into this release that was not possible due to the re-write of the nmbd code was the scalability features in the Samba WINS server. This feature is now tentatively scheduled for the next release (1.9.19). Apologies to anyone who was hoping for this feature to be included. The nmbd re-write will make it much easier to add such things in future. New parameters in smb.conf. --------------------------- New Global parameters. ---------------------- Documented in the smb.conf man pages : "bind interfaces only" "lm announce" "lm interval" "logon drive" "logon home" "min wins ttl" "max wins ttl" "username level" New Share level parameters. --------------------------- Documented in the smb.conf man pages : "delete veto files" "oplocks" Nascent web interface for configuration. ---------------------------------------- source/wsmbconf.c is a cgi-bin program for editing smb.conf. It can also be run standalone. This is in a very early stage of development. Debugging support. ------------------ smbd and nmbd will now modify their debug log level when they receive a USR1 signal (increase debug level by one) and USR2 signal (decrease debug level by one). This has been added to aid administrators track down faults that only occur after long periods of time, or transiently. Reporting bugs. --------------- If you have problems, or think you have found a bug please email a report to : samba-bugs@samba.anu.edu.au Please state the version number of Samba that you are running, and *full details* of the steps we need to reproduce the problem. As always, all bugs are our responsibility. Regards, The Samba Team.